“The saddest picture ever made, Orson Welles called it.”
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— sigrid nunez, “what are you going through”

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In the dream, which appears to be a straight-to-cable movie, I am Han Solo. Hey, I am not in charge of casting for my dreams, so don’t judge.

It’s just me and Luke Skywalker. Chewbacca apparently was too expensive for the limited budget of my dream. These are hard times for making movies, I suppose.

I am tasked with rescuing Princess Leia, who is being held in a detention center on the U.S. border, an unfortunate incident in which she was trying to save the universe but didn’t have proper documentation at the time she was shot down.

The task is made harder because I’m reporting and designing an article about the rescue in real time. The newspaper I’m working on is particularly difficult because the paper is shaped like a Jedi starfighter as a marketing gimmick, making it difficult to fit news on the page.

We have just started out on the endeavor when Luke insists we stop for Mexican food. Impossible to find a good breakfast taco on Tatooine, he laments.

We find a great joint that has enchiladas suizas. I vaguely recall that Enchiladas Suizas may have been the bad guy in one of the middle Star Wars movies I never saw. An obvious plot device signaling upcoming trouble?

We nap in the starfighter, as one often does after indulging in too many enchiladas. I take advantage of the break to file my story. Because of the awkward size of the newspaper, the article is already too long (stories are not allowed to jump in the future because of Ewoks’ limited attention span and therefore must fit on one page), so there is no room left in the story to stage a rescue of Leia.

Disappointed but hungry again, we go back for empanadas instead. My story on “The Rescue of Leia” becomes a food review: “Out of This World Empanadas in West Texas, Wherever That Is.” I wonder what my next job will be.

As we wait for our order, I read the comics on the back of the paper. Due to the awkward starfighter shape of the page, all of the comic strips’ punch lines have been cut off. Rat is staring at me as if it’s my fault.

The empanada is excellent. I get one to go for Chewie. It’s not wise to upset a Wookiee.

Sorry, Leia.

Roll credits.

I wake up.